Code Craft

Software Development is not just Engineering. It also has a personal, artisanal quality where we create something with care. These articles focus on personal development, tooling, and Making.

The section used to be called “craftsmanship”, until I learned that maybe, this term is insufficiently inclusive. It is interesting to observe how other people took that message. Whereas some took this as an opportunity to reflect, Robert C. Martin decided to prove the point. I’ll book that as yet another case of “Uncle Bob Considered Harmful.”

What is reasonable code? In an article on The Whiteboard, a fellow software developer under the pen name “Jimmy Hoffa” thinks about reasonability as a measure of code quality. He arrives at six exemplary properties of reasonable code:

small scope

short stacks

explicit data use

explicit data ownership

explicit outputs

dictating instead of deciding

He makes a good case for continuous self-​improvement and a focus on code quality in our development process. It is well worth the read, especially for beginning professionals. And not quite by chance, it seems to be a subtle advertisement for functional programming and static typing: anything else would have a hard time meeting his characteristics of reasonable code.